I can't vouch for the quality of their products or service, but I know Robocoin is one of the leading Bitcoin ATM manufacturers. According to Coin ATM Radar, there currently are 44 Robocoin ATMs operational worldwide, in the United States, the UK, Canada, Spain, Japan,... Robocoin provided the very first Bitcoin ATM machine in the world, in October 2013 in Vancouver, Canada.

They are currently ranked 2nd, after Lamassu with 90 ATMs. But the Lamassu ATMs are mostly smaller and cheaper one-way machines (cash to Bitcoin), although they do sell a two-way solution now.

On Coin ATM Radar, a total of 267 operational Bitcoin ATMs are registered at the moment.

If their first project with Internet.org is an indication, only after you pay up. The "free internet" project in Zambia gives people only access to 13 websites (including Facebook, of course) for free, and if they want to exit the walled garden (e.g. by clicking on a link in Facebook), they have to pay. Also, Facebook didn't invest money in the project, the local (private) operator pays for this so they can get more paying customers later on.

jaywink writes: A new diaspora* version 0.4.1.0 is out. It includes a lot of pages ported to Bootstrap, many bug fixes and small enhancements. Also included is a Terms of Service -feature for podmins. Diaspora* is an open source social networking server that joins all running pods into one big decentralized social network.Link to Original Source

"Vrije University" in the title sounds realy strange to me, as a native Dutch speaker. Vrije isn't a city, "Vrije Universiteit" means "Free University," which indicates it's not linked to e.g. the Catholic church. Just FYI.

The Verge had a good article criticizing this project. The article doesn't break down the project completely, but points out why their goals are far-fetched, and people should not get too exited.

Also note that when looking at the project, it's not initially clear that a connection with the main electricity grid is still necessary. At night, displaying the signs and defrosting the road is done with electricity from the net. During the day, the solar panels can transfer electricity back to the grid. Their current implementation doesn't include batteries to store electricity locally, and this wouldn't be very environmentally friendly anyway.

An anonymous reader writes: On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.

We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott

An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot users flame all site stories with comments about the sites forced switching over to Beta version. The comments are relentless, calling for a ban of the site from Feb 10 to Feb 17. The following post is being made in every story comment:On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this [slashdot.org] in a new tab. After seeing that, click here [slashdot.org] to return to classic Slashdot.We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott [slashdot.org]Moderators — only spend mod points on comments that discuss BetaCommentors — only discuss Betahttp://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] — Vote up the Fuck Beta storiesKeep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.Captcha: fuckbeta

wbr1 writes: It seems abundantly clear now that Dice and the SlashBeta designers do not care one whit about the community here. They do not care about rolling in crapware into sourceforge installers. In short, the only thing that talks to them is money and stupid ideas.

Granted, it takes cash to run sites like these, but they were fine before. The question is, do some of you here want to band together, get whatever is available of slashcode and rebuild this community somewhere else? We can try to make it as it once was, a haven of geeky knowledge and frosty piss, delivered free of charge in a clean community moderated format.

The primary solution is for miners to switch to a peer-to-peer mining pool. In these the control is decentralized, just like the Bitcoin network itself. Even if such a pool hits 51% market share, it will not be able to actually block or reverse transactions, since the mining pool is decentralized and so its power is vested in the network as a whole.

I'm a happy Mobile Vikings customer for almost two years now, and I applaud their move to accept Bitcoin. I will be using this option from now on.

Mobile Vikings are a small, tech oriented operator. Like several small operators in Belgium they use the cell tower network of one of the 3 big operators. MV were the first in Belgium to offer a decent plan for mobile data usage, a 15 € per month prepaid formula with 2 GB data included, while other operators where still billing (a lot) per MB used. When a lot of customers switched, this forced the big operators to offer similar plans (although they still cost more).

Like almost all online merchants who accept Bitcoin, they set their price in euros or dollars and the price in BTC is calculated at the moment of sale. Mobile Vikings uses BitPay as a payment processor who offers this service, another one is Coinbase.

There is no centralization. It's just that the genesis block (the first block in the chain, or in case of eMunie the first block of the tree) does not start with a balance of zero. After that there is nothing centralized in the system, it's a peer-to-peer network without central servers just like Bitcoin.

I'm one of those who gave some BTC to get a part of the initial eMunie supply. That makes me a victim in your eyes I suppose:-)

I like the fact that Dan (the creator of eMunie) is very transparent and open in these matters, we will know how much money he collects. I trust him when he says these funds will be used to further develop and promote eMunie. And I don't have a problem with him being paid for the work he does. In fact, he has be working full time on this project for more than half a year now, completely on his own expense.